The Simple Truth
DO YOU REALLY need a $5,000, 54-pound, two-channel integrated amplifier? Yes, of course you do. Especially if that integrated amplifier is the new Edge A from Cambridge Audio, a British firm with a long record of seriousness about sound reproduction. Cambridge’s gear has always struck me as a rigorously high-end/high-value proposition, but the Edge A looks, tastes, and smells more like a no-holds-barred statement design, the kind we’re more likely to expect from a company whose bottom line is that they don’t give a fig for the bottom line. But since Cambridge’s new Edge series of components (there’s also a preamp/streamer and power amp in the Edge Series portfolio) commemorates the firm’s half-century anniversary, we’re prepared to make allowances.
Let’s begin with the packing materials (something for which I admit a modest fetish). Depending on how you want to count, the Edge A arrives either triple- or quadruple-boxed, the structural-cardboard one fixed closed by those snap-in plastic handle/locks behind which you usually find—I don’t know, rocket launchers? Fissionable materials? The innermost one is a full-surround foam casket, the foam instead of working-class drawstrings. (The packing materials used for the Edge A alone tip the scales at 14 pounds. I know: I weighed them.)
